Your data cap stinks: average wireless data use nearly doubled in a year

AT&T and Verizon both place hard limits on the amount of data that their subscribers can use within a given month. That's not a problem for most people, but consumer habits may eventually create one. In the past year, the amount of data traffic that the average US subscriber uses is almost twice as high as it was last year.

Chetan Sharma reports that the average cellular customer in the US consumed 690 MB in 2012. The average number increased to 1.2 GB in 2013. That's still within the range of the lower tiers of carrier data packages, but it's a sign that consumers crave more video, photos, music streaming, and web browsing, which will significantly increase the amount of data that they use. Wireless data collectively has expanded a great deal in the smartphone era, but higher usage patterns are starting to become a standard rather than a sign of a power user.

As smartphones continue to get faster, have better screens, and are able to take advantage of 4G LTE networks, the average wireless data usage will continue to climb. Data usage is on the rise globally as well, increased from 140 MB last year to 240 MB this year, so the world is on pace to have more data transferred through wireless devices than wired devices by 2016.